The Artful Home
28.05.25
The way a home looks, how the space inside is arranged, where a home is located, and how the people who live there interact — these are meaningful details that can be taken for granted. I didn’t grow up in a detached, single-family house, on a quiet tree-lined street. Growing up, I lived upstairs of an Italian deli, which my parents owned and ran. In between procuring and selling Italian grocery foods, our family ate kimchi stew and handmade dumplings at the back of the store. On occasion my mom would make one of those home economics inspired dishes — a casserole — that she’d stumble upon in Canadian Living magazine. The one that lives on in my brain involved enormous grey sausages spooning on a bed of scalloped potatoes.
We had touched down in Toronto by plane from Seoul three years earlier, on my third birthday. It’s been several decades since our family’s deli closed and I’ve yet to have a proper conversation with my parents about how, as Korean immigrants in Canada, they arrived at the decision to become purveyors of prosciutto and mortadella sandwiches. In Korea, my father had been an engineer at an airline and my mother a classical pianist, until she married and had babies. Neither of them knew Italian or Portuguese. My father barely spoke English.
Over time I’ve come to appreciate that a Korean family operating an Italian deli is not that strange. Life is full of examples of ideas and customs from one place taking root in another. If you garden, this is a familiar process. Every year, something I didn’t plant magically appears, having migrated one way or another from someone else’s garden. It’s often a weed but sometimes, it’s something very special, like the electric blue sea holly that shouldered its way through a maze of tree roots to hang out with my perennials.
My mother was adept at learning languages. Her English was good and in very little time she could handle a simple conversation in Italian. Taking after my mother in this way, I also learned the language, or at least enough to enthusiastically greet people from the cash register and tell them how much their total was. Buongiorno signore…uno venticinque! Buongiorno signora…ventuno quarantanove! The nonnos and nonnas found this pretty entertaining. We’d recognize each other and wave when I walked past their verandas on the way to and back from school. Not realizing how exhausting it is to be a grown up, I used to wonder what they found so enjoyable about watching the cars and people go by to make that a daily routine. I’ve since come to understand how protecting one’s time for something other than work is a show of self-respect. Getting fresh air and becoming a bystander to other people’s busyness can be a very satisfying way to end the day.
Our deli eventually became a convenience store — a common business, especially onwards from the ‘60s, for so many Korean immigrant families who settled in Ontario. Pollination and propagation are important for growth but so are the soil conditions. I imagine it was a tough learning curve for my parents to keep up being Italian grocers. By the 1970s, the collective action of Korean convenience store owners in Ontario led to the formation of the Korean Businessmen’s Association. It still goes by that name. Old school Koreans are not known for their gender progressiveness.
My mother and father worked side by side every day in their store. This was probably true for every other convenience store owned and operated by an Omma and Appa. Without my mother’s ability to connect with customers and her agility at making decisions, the business would not have lasted as long as it did. That said, the Korean Businessmen’s Association had expanded so much over the ‘70s that it was able to open its own wholesale cooperative in the ‘80s. I imagine that being able to run their business with suppliers who were Korean immigrants themselves, and understood first-hand the ins and outs of owning and operating a convenience store, helped make my parents’ lives a little bit easier. Owning a deli made sense in a predominantly Italian and Portuguese neighbourhood, but my parents and the nice people at Unico were probably never going to sling back beers after hours and talk animatedly about politics and storekeeping over bulgogi and tangsuyuk.
I’ve since learned that for my dad, the business of selling North American candy bars, snacks and canned goods was accompanied by a deep nostalgia. Born in the 40s, his childhood often occasioned animated encounters with American GIs stationed in Seoul. It wasn’t just the novelty of spotting Americans that drew my dad and his school friends to chase after soldiers in the street. GI’s were like walking convenience stores, but better, handing out sticks of Wrigley’s chewing gum and Hershey chocolate bars to their young fans. My dad can still vividly recall the taste of his very first candy bar. Pure magic. And now here he was, with his own store full of Hershey bars and Wrigley’s spearmint gum.
By the early 90’s, our deli had fully become a convenience store. The signs of a gradual transition were apparently all around me, but the change felt like it happened in a flash. One day I came home from school and the deli counter was gone. In its place were wide open shelves of boxes, pouches and cans. There’s something poignant about cured deli meats being replaced with tidy rows of Chef Boyardee and Alphagetti. This was the food I grew up around. I definitely ate too many potato chips but fortunately, our family’s daily diet continued to revolve around homemade Korean food. Being surrounded by all those boxes, pouches and cans was more like being in a library, except instead of books on shelves, there were rows and rows of processed and manufactured foods. I partly owe becoming a capable reader to all the bizarre ingredients I learned to sound out over those many hours spent in the store. Carrageenan. Glyceryl monostearate. Butylated hydroxytoluene.
The experience of owning and living one’s day to day in a convenience store has since been made into art. You may have heard of the TV show, Kim’s Convenience, on the good ol’ CBC. A couple months ago, I saw the play that started it all, by Ins Choi. The play debuted in 2011 but I didn’t see it then. I was full swing into my PhD program and finding it hard to justify doing fun and soul enriching things like going to the theatre. Maybe a part of me was also worried that I would be disappointed, that the play would be packaged and watered down for a general audience in the way that meatballs in a can will never taste like meatballs made from scratch. Or maybe I thought the experience was too personal and I wasn’t prepared to sit in a room with a bunch of strangers to watch a dramatization of something that too closely resembled my life. All this to say, having finally seen it, I feel a bit like I’ve been passed a baton and invited to keep the story going.
Ins Choi, Kim’s Convenience, 2011
When you walk into the theatre, you notice the set right away. It’s a remarkably detailed and faithful recreation of inside a convenience store, from the perforated metal shelves, the tidy displays of canned and boxed foods, mass marketed beverages peeking through coolers with glass doors, the lottery kiosk and scratch cards at the cash register and an unexpected display of souvenir T-shirts and baseball hats. In every convenience store, there’s a section of products that makes you scratch your head. At one time our store suddenly sold sunglasses, lots of sunglasses in one of those illuminated rotating racks. We sold a few at first and then the rack was just there, until it wasn’t. Another time we had fake taxidermied and mounted fish that would flap and sing at the sound of a clap. To my surprise and confusion, those were a top seller.
One of the play’s most striking features is the set itself. Fully visible before the play begins, the store was already there in the open. There were no curtains separating the audience from the stage. Going to a convenience store is not a remarkable experience but seeing one faithfully recreated in a play is unexpected and interesting. After the lights dimmed, a slideshow began to play on the faux brick backdrop above the set. The photos showed various convenience stores and their Korean owners. The interiors of all the stores in the photos looked so alike. Every one of them resembled the one I grew up in. It felt like at any moment, I would see a photo of my own parents or one of myself as a child by the cash register. Following the play, I got to meet and briefly chat with the playwright, who also performed the role of Appa. When Kim’s Convenience premiered fourteen years ago, Choi had played the role of Jung, the son. I’m not normally one to stick around and speak to the talent post-show but with encouragement from a friend, I took a deep breath and got in line. Doing my best to appear chill, I shared with Choi that I had grown up in a convenience store and was thankful to him for turning that space and experience into art.
Art and the home reinforce each other in so many ways. Even though there are many different types of homes and living arrangements, they are not widely represented in the world of fine art. Visit any major art museum and you’re unlikely to encounter a gallery full of paintings showing portraits of immigrants tending cash registers, bagging groceries and positioning salumi on a meat slicer. Neither will you find ornately framed paintings of children brushing their teeth over a laundry sink or spying on customers from inside a walk-in cooler. This is to be expected. Our house wasn’t a house. It was an upstairs and back of the main floor and an unfinished commercial basement. The store took priority. The store had order and an intended appearance. There were dedicated areas and displays for specific types of objects like the frozen food section, the deli counter (when we had it), the dairy cooler and the shelves of canned vegetables.
Our family slept, ate, bathed, rested and entertained in the unused, unprioritized spaces of the store — very much the reverse of a typical single-family home where the living areas take up the greatest amount of space and consideration. Just as you wouldn’t typically apply a great deal of care into getting the look just right for a utility room, cantina, attic, laundry area, or a roughed in washroom, the notion of interior design did not factor into our living room, bedrooms, kitchen, dining areas and washrooms. There were certainly no oil paintings on the walls. The kinds of art you encounter in the galleries of art museums represent the culture of a very different social, cultural and economic slice of life. My parents worked their asses off and could sing the hell out of a song on their karaoke machine. They lived where they worked. They were not wealthy art collectors.
Covered box, 12th century, 1.75" x 4.8", lacquered wood inlaid with mother of pearl, Tokyo National Museum, TH-466
That said, they did have a spectacular nong — an immense three-piece wall unit constructed out of lacquer coated wood and decorated with a mural of flora and fauna fashioned from mother of pearl. Shiny, smooth and iridescent, mother of pearl is harvested from the inner lining of mollusk shells. Called 나전칠기(romanized as nach’ŏnch’ilgi or najeonchilgi), the technique of inlaying mother of pearl on lacquered wood dates back to antiquity. An enormous and rather dazzling piece of furniture, the nong was a wedding gift from my mother’s parents. There was also an accompanying mother of pearl prunus vase on a mother of pearl stand. For anyone who didn’t grow up surrounded by najeonchilgi, mother of pearl is also an auspicious material symbolizing the natural world, purity, beauty and protection. We also had a tall painting on silk of a tiger (another auspicious symbol) and an ink painting (sumukhwa) of mountains, water and sky (more auspiciousness). I didn’t register these works of art as works of art at the time. They were in our home. They were Korean and, like our family, made sense to be there.
That said, when I started learning about a Western canon of art, I began noticing how certain types of art and a certain type of home reinforce each other. When I look at a watercolour painting like Karl Beckmann’s Drawing Room of Prince Wilhelm in the Palace at Berlin (c. 1840), I think a couple of things. First, that it is a very fine watercolour painting and second, my entire house could probably fit into this room.
Karl Beckmann, Drawing Room of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia in the Palace at Berlin, watercolour, ca.1840
John Robert Cozens, Lake of Albano and Castel Gandolfo, watercolour, ca. 1777
That said, Drawing Room is wonderfully meticulous. In its vantage point and detail, it reads today a bit like a photo taken with a watercolour filter. The wonders of photography were well known at the time Beckmann painted Drawing Room. New technologies can often lead to the expansion and invention of new applications for pre-existing technologies. Photography is a good example of this. As much as this painting is meant to present Prince Wilhelm’s drawing room, it also illustrates the properties of watercolour as a medium. Watercolour is terrific for conveying minute and fastidious details. It can also be used to achieve a more expressive and poetic effect. John Robert Cozens’ watercolour landscapes are a good example of this. Knowing that the same paint can be used to achieve rather different effects is instructive. Beckmann’s painting is lovely to look at and a form of reporting. The details in Drawing Room register as information, and they are executed with a skill and steadiness of hand that suggests the information is accurate. By the time Beckmann had made this painting, he had also been teaching architecture and linear perspective for several years at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. Both a beautiful painting and a functional document, Drawing Room offers a substitute to actually being in the actual drawing room of Prince Wilhelm who, as I understand from a quick Google search, spent most of his time in either Paris or his castle in Poland.
Richard Hamilton. Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, collage, 1956
Beckmann’s illustration of Prince Wilhelm’s drawing room is noticeably different from something like Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956). This collage by the British artist, Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), is obviously not an account of a place in real life. He’s given us a playful commentary on popular culture, materialism and the staging of gendered stereotypes and heterosexuality in the modern home. It looks like an eye-catching ad making a joke about being an eye-catching ad. It’s fun, saucy and observational. Funnily enough, the artist who created this iconic example of pop art also worked as a technical draftsman. Like Beckmann, Hamilton had the training and experience to draw very precisely. This is something to remember when we look at works of art made with techniques like collage, which appears to rely on skills apart from drawing and painting.
Perhaps because of its assembled appearance, a collage invites judgment as being less painstaking to make than, say, a painting like Beckmann’s. A judgment like this basically assumes a standard process for making a work of art. I suppose this makes sense if there is only one form of art and one way to make it. But there are as many ways to make art as there are materials to make art with. With collage you select and fit together components (images and/or text) taken from different sources, oftentimes magazines and newspapers, to create something altogether new yet familiar. The individual components, like words, already exist. You don’t need to actually draw or create a picture of a lollipop. You can simply cut out a printed image of it and glue it onto another surface. Drawing and painting are optional. So is gluing. You can use tape to stick the parts together. Or cooked short-grain rice as I did as a child. Or paint. Or digital software. Anyone who makes art knows that one of the most enjoyable parts about making art is discovering new ways to do it. Collage is one of them. As is making a play about life in a convenience store.
Collage emphasizes selection, combination, chance and the constructed nature of meaning. To create a collage, you literally piece it together using random components. The cut edges of the individual parts and the glue that sticks everything together make clear that the final image was manually assembled. These days, software allows for a seamless and glueless approach to collage making. It also enables the production of multiple copies, which is great from a commercial standpoint if you’re looking to sell your art. Still, I prefer the tactile look of a glue and paper collage, even though over time it may become warped and discoloured.
Going back to Beckmann’s presentation of Prince Wilhelm’s drawing room, we can easily admire the skill required to make that painting. We also register the image as something recognizable and complete — a room. It’s full of detail and the perspective so convincingly rendered that even though we know we are looking at paints and lines applied to a piece of paper, the room has a realness. The caption tells us it’s Prince Wilhelm’s drawing room, and we are prepared to believe it. A prince would have a drawing room. I have been in rooms in which I have made drawings.
What I enjoy most about Beckmann’s painting is its medium. If you’ve ever painted with watercolours, you know it is a challenging paint to master. Half the battle is just understanding how much water to use. Beginners tend to overdo it with the water when only a damp brush is needed, especially when colouring in small details. Tiny details demand tiny brushes and a steady hand. Lots of water is a great idea if you’re doing a wash, where you sweep the paper with a big wet brush and just enough pigment to create a sheer all-over veil of colour, which you can build in layers. It’s important to take your time and gradually build up colour as needed. Skillful water painting also demands confidence, foresight and dynamism, even though watercolours are probably the least intimidating of all the paints when you see it in the store. Those little discs of paint look so cute and tidy in their plastic pan. If you buy them at the dollar store, they’re usually accompanied by a brush with very stiff and unwieldy bristles. If you’re a parent, watercolour paints are ideal because they’re cheap, easy to use, and not very messy. It’s the only kind of paint I’ve ever allowed my kids to bring onto a flight or car ride.
* * *
This second post got stalled for several months. Not just because adopting a new routine — even something as enjoyable as a blog — is challenging — but because I went from thinking this would just be a fun sort of blog to finding that for the first few months of this year, I was in a state of worry and anger. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As I tell my kids, it’s okay to feel your feelings. Anger is especially instructive and effective at bringing people to action, especially where political causes are concerned. One of the main reasons why the topics of art and the home are interesting to me is because they are, but not always so obviously, suffused with struggles and tensions over space, resources and legitimacy. It’s this not-so-obvious-obvious-politics of art and the home that also make it necessary to keep talking about them. I also know that it’s not enjoyable to be the audience of someone’s rage. The art of language seems to go by the wayside when anger reaches a point of excess. And for the past several months, there have been a lot of big angry feelings about the future of this country and its relationship to the one next door.
It’s one thing to refer to annexation when it’s something that happened in a former century and in a country you don’t live in anymore. I mentioned in my first post how Japan had annexed Korea from 1910-1945. It happened and is forever a part of world history. It's another thing to find yourself face to face with threats of annexation and economic warfare in the present day and in the country you call home. While the president next door was spouting off about making Canada its 51st state, this country was trying to figure out who would lead it. Thankfully we now have a PM firmly in place and, in my opinion, one who seems more than ready and fit for the job. If you haven’t seen Mark Carney being interviewed by Nardwuar, get on that. Yes, we need a PM who is serious and competent but there’s a special kind of reassurance that comes from knowing that the person who holds the highest office has a sense of humour and responds with genuine enthusiasm when presented with a vinyl copy of Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.
***
Back to art and the home.
Alison Tyne, Untitled, 2008
Human effort brings art and the home into being. And, if something can be put together, it can be taken apart. I have a photograph by Alison Tyne that shows this so perfectly. It’s a small little square of a photo (approx. 5” x 5”). I found it on Etsy over a decade ago while scrolling through pages and pages of other photos showing plants, doors, animals, the clothed and unclothed bodies of young women, beaches, deserts and famous landmarks. The one I chose is a time lapsed photo of a woman ascending and descending a ladder. She’s in a dimly lit room with three walls and no ceiling. The scene recalls that moment when the camera pulls away during an SNL skit and you’re reminded that the little world you fell into was a creation on a stage. The world in this photo looks like an apartment, a fixer upper with swatches of white paint here and there on the blue-green walls left behind by the previous tenant. There’s a doorway through which we see another room and another room beyond it. It looks very much like a set, but instead of a metal arm floating a boom overhead, we see blue sky with wispy white clouds. Through the window to the right there’s a building next door. The building is lit with the warm glow of daybreak. Or maybe it’s sundown. Either way, the light is showing there’s an outside to an inside. Then you realize the light outside doesn’t match the sky above the room. Turns out the sky is not beyond the room. So it’s the ceiling? Did she paint it to look like that? Is that why the ladder is there?
There’s a lot of, “I see what’s going on, but then why…” with this photo. It’s something of a riddle. Such a fun work of art. I love it for its ambiguity on the one hand and at the same time, how poetically it conveys that reality is delicate and constructed. I think like this lady going up and down the ladder I’ve been focussed for much of my life on my most immediate surroundings. With all its contradictions and clues referring to its manipulated creation, this photo has such a dreamy feel. It hangs framed above my desk and still holds my attention after all these years, reminding me in its captivating way not to get too attached to the surface of things. I say this while knowing it's also naïve to insist that appearances don’t matter. Women and girls understand this most acutely.
I looked up Alison Tyne recently to see what she’s been creating since I stumbled upon this photo so many years ago. Turns out she’s also an artistic director and an accomplished knitter who makes the most stunning sweaters. Her colour combinations and eye for pattern make me want to pick up my knitting needles and create my own collection of rock ‘n’ roll inspired cardigans, neon coloured pullovers and chunky cropped tanks.
Growing up in a store and becoming a student of art, I’ve come to a few realizations. There is freedom and creativity in being able to make a work of art. The values of freedom and creativity are also associated with the home, particularly when it comes to its artful arrangement and design. The making of art and the home can also be very prescribed practices with rules and hierarchies. The extent to which someone cares to be in step with the rules or whether they’re even aware that art and the home are socially and culturally governed also says something about their community, resources, politics and priorities. There is art we put in our homes, homes that are themselves works of art and art that confronts the very idea of home. We have and need all of these, and any others waiting to be realized.